Previous research suggests that users evaluate a robot more favorably after a first-person (immersive) experience than from a third-person perspective. The present study explored how imagined human-robot interactions from different perspectives (i.e., 1st vs 3rd person perspective) would affect self-efficacy (toward the task and the robot), trust, and acceptance of the robot. Several key variables may potentially moderate the effects of perspective; we investigated different combinations of factors in order to obtain a more comprehensive understanding. Participants read hypothetical cooking vignettes involving a human-robot interaction, written from either a first-person or a third-person perspective. Additionally, we evaluate the impact of robot action (i.e., failure vs success robot performance). Evaluations of the robot and the interaction were higher after reading the successful outcome vignettes, replicating previous findings. However, perspective had no significant effect. These results suggest possible differences between actual and imagined human-robot interactions and highlight the unique impact of first-hand interaction with real robots.

INTRODUCTION: Sound is an important interaction modality and a large part of human interaction happens in the aural domain. While research in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has long explored spoken language for interacting with humans, sound as a broader-and, to a significant degree, nonlexical (i.e., without words)-medium has been given comparably less attention. Yet, the range of sounds that robots can produce is vast, encompassing, among others, mechanical noise, music, and utterances that mimic human and animal vocalizations with varying degrees of realism. The sound of a robot's machinery can shape our perceptions and expectations [11, 17], music serves as a medium for robots to engage and communicate [18], and shared musical experiences can strengthen the bond between humans and robots [5]. Sonifications may enhance the legibility of movement and gestures [4, 7, 15] and beep sounds may be used to communicate emotions [2, 14]. Getting closer to themargins of language, robotsmay take inspiration from non-lexical fillers such as "uh" [13, 16] and backchannels such as "mhmm" [8, 12]. More generally, pitch, intensity, and other human prosodic variations may be drawn on in robot sound design [3, 10]. The information that can be extracted from sound in a robot's environment is equally rich. Beyond the recognition of semantic content, robots use, for example, sound source localization to gain a better understanding of their environment [9], or analyze a human's voice timbre and tone to distinguish speakers [6] and detect emotion [1].

Having an attachment is important to promote the utilization of electronic devices. To induce an emotional bond between people and voice interface, several companies have often named the voice interface. The present study examined whether a form of address (i.e., a way of calling a name of a voice agent or consumer) would modulate creating an attachment. Results showed that consumers reported a stronger attachment with voice agents that fit with the master-servant relationship based on the way of calling the name. Interestingly, this tendency was confirmed only for the behavioral index, but not for the subjective reports, suggesting that the form of address would implicitly affect the selection of behavior. Also, our findings indicate that increasing the emotional bond between consumers and voice agents could be modulated by the perception of the power balance during a human-agent interaction.

In 1999 Sony released the AlBO Entertainment Robot, selling more than 150,000 units worldwide until 2006. By 2014, Sony had stopped offering upgrades and maintenance for the product, and owners were faced with the fact their pet-like robots would “die”. Some shrines and temples in Japan hold ningyo kuyō or mass funerals for dolls and other toys. At the suggestion of a small Japanese tech-repair company called A-Fun, one temple began offering a Buddhist funeral ceremony for AIBOs. Approximately 700 AIBOs have so far received a funeral service. This paper surveys A-Fun‘s maintenance services for old AIBOs, the AIBO funerals, and Sony's new 2018 AIBO release, in the cross-disciplinary context of human-machine relations in Japan and elsewhere. Drawing on the author's interviews with key actors, it articulates links between philosophy and neuroscience to explain tendencies toward zoomorphism in robot design. Perceiving presence (sonzai kan) and sensibility (kansei) in objects is a culturally contingent phenomenon. Whereas ways of conceiving the partly animate are largely absent from Western philosophy, in the case of AIBO ownership in Japan there is a reverential mindfulness of the technology's inherent contradictions.

A large proportion of “very humanlike” androids are assigned aesthetics typically associated with femininity. Ethical and discriminatory issues have yet to be given in-depth attention in procedural literature. This position paper suggests that implicitly viewing humanlike robots as agents that could, in future, substitute “undesirable” and/or exploitable humans may affect not just the robots' design, but also the human demographics considered replaceable. Such tendencies must be carefully considered by researchers, businesses, and policy makers. Interdisciplinary analysis may inform and expand social and cultural negotiations in the design of these androids.

Latest research in robotics is driven by a desire to develop systems that would allow humans to interact with robots in natural and intuitive ways. In this paper we investigate peoples' initial believes, expectations and ascribed mental capabilities of a robot when they encounter it for the first time and how these change after interacting with the robot. The differences between two robots, which differ in morphology and behavior, are compared.

This study focuses on differences and similarities of perception of a small humanoid robot between Japanese and Australian participants. Two conditions were investigated: participants actively interacting with the robot and bystanders observing the interaction. Experimental results suggested that, while the robot was perceived as highly likeable, Japanese participants rated the robot higher for animacy, intelligence and safety. Furthermore, passive observations of the interaction (rather than active interaction) resulted in higher ratings by Japanese participants for anthropomorphism, animacy, intelligence and safety. The findings are discussed in terms of cultural background and robot perception.

A purpose of this study is to clarify the relationship between the usability of information technology devices in business use and the cognitive characteristics of aged people. A central control room is a workplace often staffed with aging personnel. In order to investigate what kind of a decline in cognitive function of older adults affects their operational abilities, we tested participants who were then classified into three groups according to the type of decline in their cognitive characteristics: a decline in working memory (WM), a decline in visual attention (AT), or a decline in task-switching (TS). In addition, people with completely normal cognitive function were recruited as a control group. A simulator of a central monitoring device was prepared to examine performance of an inspection operation. Reaction time data showed a significant difference between the controls and the WM group (p<;.05). For the error ratio, a significant difference was seen between controls and the TS group (p<;.05). Performance on the inspection task was negatively affected by the decline in working memory and in task switching. Based on these results, we discuss a design that can compensate for such cognitive aging effects.

We investigated how tactile stimuli induced feelings of animacy and pleasantness in human observers. First, we developed a new tactile display that enabled limp yet powerful tactile stimulations with a wide range of frequencies. Second, we examined the induced sensation by tactile stimulation as a function of stimulus frequency and body part. We found that the feeling of animacy was dependent upon stimulus frequency. The 12 Hz stimulation induced the strongest feeling of animacy. The frequency dependence was qualitatively similar but quantitatively different between finger and wrist stimulation. In addition, the modest feeling of animacy was associated with the strong feeling of pleasantness in finger stimulation. These results suggest that tactile stimulation can induce feelings of animacy in a frequency-dependent manner and that the frequency dependence and induced emotion of tactile stimulation may differ among different body parts.

This paper proposes a spatial filtering technique to effectively receive narrow angle spread multipath signals incoming to the typical macro cell base station in DS/CDMA cellular systems. In the proposed system, a hypothetical received signal for each antenna element is generated in the receiver using the measured delay profiles and known QPSK symbol sequences, and this signal is employed for antenna weight calculation. At this stage to create high gain pointing toward all the desired multipath components in the spatial filter, phase and delay time of the measured delay profiles for the hypothetical received signal is adjusted to be equal to enhance the generated hypothetical received signal with inphase. Computer simulation confirms that the proposed algorithm can create an effective spatial filter for receiving narrow angle multipath and achieves better performance than the conventional algorithm.

This paper evaluates the effect of angle spread on the system capacity for a DS/CDMA system using a delay profile measurement based adaptive array antenna combined with beam pattern selection diversity and carrier-to-interference plus noise (CINR) based transmit power control (TPC) techniques. In the proposed system, beam directivity is controlled by the delay profiles for each terminal measured in each antenna element. Moreover, to reduce the number of computation for the beam directivity control, the proposed system calculates the optimum beam directivity for only a limited number of terminals that locates far from the base station, and signals from the rest of the terminals are demodulated by selecting one of the most reliable adaptive array combined signals. This technique is called beam pattern diversity. For the evaluation of impact of the angle spread of the multipath components on the capacity of DS/CDMA systems with an adaptive array antenna, computer simulation is conducted. The results show that the proposed scheme gives better performance than the sector antenna systems under practical angle spread conditions; i.e. less than 10 degree, with relatively a small number of computation.